SPECIAL GUESTS

NICK BUTLER, PH.D.

Nick Butler teaches instructional design, communication and film studies courses at Arizona State University. He earned his Ph.D. in educational technology in 2014 after completing master’s programs in film and media studies and communication at ASU and his military service as a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy. Nick was the first student from a service academy to be selected for the Telluride Film Festival's Student Symposium. His thesis film, On the Third Date, was recognized by the Las Vegas Film Festival. He is an avid traveler, having just completed a teaching assignment in Europe during the past year and a half, and a long-time supporter of the Scottsdale International Film Festival’s world cinema programming.

DARRELL COPP

Scottsdale Community College (SCC) Moderator Darrell Copp received his B.S. in communication and performance arts from Eastern Michigan University and his M.A. in communication from ASU. He coordinates the Film Humanities program in the Department of Communication and Performance Arts at SCC.

ABDULLAHI GALLAB PH.D.

Professor Abdullahi Gallab brings to his research and teaching the unique perspectives of a scholar and a former journalist practicing in Sudan. His 2008 book, The First Islamist Republic: Development and Disintegration of Islamism in the Sudan, is the story of the social world of Islamism. His later book, A Civil Society Deferred: The Tertiary Grip of Violence in the Sudan, is a critical inquiry into the colonial and post-colonial states as they developed in the Sudan and their relationship to violence. Under preparation is Gallab's book Their Second Republic: Islamism in the Sudan from Disintegration to Oblivion, a continuation of the study of Islamism in power in the Sudan.

Active in the Sudan Studies Association (SSA) of North America (which now has its home within African and African-American Studies in the ASU's School of Social Transformation), Professor Gallab is former editor and current publisher of the organization's bulletin, hosted the SSA 2012 conference at ASU and served as president of the organization from 2013-15. Gallab serves as co-chair of Islamic Studies for the American Academy of Religion (AAR) Western Region and is a board member for the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.

At ASU, Professor Gallab also serves as a member of the Honors faculty and is on the advisory board for the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict.

ANNA HOLIAN, PH.D.

Anna Holian is associate professor of modern European history at Arizona State University. She holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago and is the author of a book about refugees in Germany after World War II. She is currently at work on a new book titled Europe’s War Children: A Cinematic History that looks at how postwar European filmmakers grappled with children’s wartime experiences of violence.

JANET ROBINSON

Scottsdale Community College Moderator Janet Robinson has been teaching film studies at SCC since 2000. With years of experience in the Los Angeles movie industry and her master’s degree in education, Janet has taught foreign film abroad, ranging from silent film in China to Czech film in Prague, through the Education Abroad Program at SCC.

DEBORAH E. LIPSTADT - Scheduled to appear via Skype

Dr. Deborah E. Lipstadt is Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta. She is the author of the recently published Holocaust: An American Understanding (Rutgers’s University Press) and The Eichmann Trial (Schocken/Nextbook) which was published in commemoration of the trial’s 50th anniversary. In its review of The Eichmann Trial, The New York Times described Lipstadt as having “done a great service by …recovering the event as a gripping legal drama, as well as a hinge moment in Israel’s history and in the world’s delayed awakening to the magnitude of the Holocaust.”

Lipstadt’s book History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2006), which was reissued as Denial: Holocaust History on Trial (Ecco, 2016), is the story of her libel trial in London against David Irving who sued her for calling him a Holocaust denier and right-wing extremist. The Daily Telegraph (London) described David Irving v. Penguin/Deborah Lipstadt as having "done for the new century what the Nuremberg tribunals or the Eichmann trial did for earlier generations." The judge found David Irving to be a Holocaust denier, a falsifier of history, a racist and anti-Semite. In July 2001, the Court of Appeal resoundingly rejected Irving’s appeal of the judgment against him.

Lipstadt has also published Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust (Free Press, 1986) which surveys what the American press wrote about the persecution of the Jews in the years 1933–45. At Emory, she directs the website Holocaust Denial on Trial (HDOT.org), which contains a complete archive of the proceedings of Irving v. Penguin U.K. and Deborah Lipstadt and provides answers to frequent claims made by deniers.

Lipstadt has won the Emery Williams Teaching Award, selected by alumni as the teacher who had most influenced them. She was a historical consultant to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and helped design the section of the Museum dedicated to the American response to the Holocaust. She holds a Presidential appointment to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council (from Presidents Clinton and Obama) and was asked by President George W. Bush to represent the White House at the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

At the U.S. Holocaust Museum, Lipstadt chairs the Committee on Antisemitism and State-Sponsored Holocaust Denial. She is currently writing a book, The Antisemitic Delusion: Letters to a Student, which will be published in 2017.